The Star Tribune serves as the incessant media cheerleader of the organized resistance to ICE in the Twin Cities, but it gives readers no clue about the nature of the resistance operation. Rather, ,ost recently, it gives us the profile “A pair of teen Chicago brothers are in the thick of tracking, documenting ICE activity in Twin Cities.” It’s an updated sort of Home Alone thing. And it gives us Eric Roper’s column paying tribute to “Minnesota’s civic culture” as the source of “tough ICE resistance.”
I’ve tried to draw attention to clarifying sources of information on the resistance in these posts:
• “The battle of the Twin Cities,” (January 22).
• “Inside the battle of the Twin Cities” (January 26).
• “Inside the resistance” (January 27).
The object of the Star Tribune is public relations. Theirs is a stupefyingly sickening performance. To state the obvious, it obscures rather than clarifies. Is it too late to revive the Walter Duranty Awards to recognize the Star Tribune?
While the Star Tribune’s public relations work lacks the historical importance of Walter Duranty’s journalistic wrongdoing as the Times’s Moscow bureau chief in the 1930s, it nonetheless should serve as an uncomfortable reminder of that shameful episode. As the Times’s man in Moscow, Duranty covered up Stalin’s terror famine in the Ukraine.
Reflecting in the first volume of his autobiography on his experience working for the Manchester Guardian alongside Duranty in Moscow, Malcolm Muggeridge wrote: “If the New York Times went on all those years giving great prominence to Duranty’s messages, building him and them up when they were so evidently nonsensically untrue . . . this was not, we may be sure, because the Times was deceived. Rather it wanted to be so deceived, and Duranty provided the requisite deception material.”
